Wicked City by Ace Atkins - The murder of a crime-busting attorney in 1954 in Phenix City, Alabama, spurs the community to stand up against the underworld empire that ruled the city

Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood - Canadian housemaid murders her employer and his mistress in 1843.

Arthur & George by Julian Barnes – George Edalji, an English lawyer of Indian descent, asks Sir Arthur Conan Doyle for help following his unjust conviction for mutilating horses.

13 1/2 by Nevada Barr - partially based on the true account of a young boy who killed his entire family with an ax in Rochester, Minnesota

Nemesis: the final case of Eliot Ness: a novel by William Bernhardt – based on the Cleveland Torso murders

Legionby William Peter Blatty – a sequel to The Exorcist about an apparent copycat killer copying the long-deceased Gemini Killer (based on the real Zodiac Killer)

Psycho by Robert Bloch - loosely based on the early reporting about the discovery of Ed Gein's victims

The Wettest County in the World: a novel based on a true story by Matt Bondurant - based on the author’s bootlegging relatives and events in the hollows of western Virginia in the mid-1930s

Crippen: a novel of murder by John Boyne - based on the 1910 transatlantic pursuit of Dr. Hawley Crippen for the murder and brutal dismemberment of his wife, Cora.

The Frightened Man by Kenneth M. Cameron— based on Jack the Ripper history

In Cold Blood: a True Account of a Multiple Murder and Its Consequences by Truman Capote - the story of the mass murder of a farmer, his wife, and their two children is considered to be the origin of the non-fiction novel. (HV 6533 .K3 .C3)

True History of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey - historically based story of outlaw Ned Kelly and his contentious Irish clan

The Alienistby Caleb Carr - police New York police commissioner Theodore Roosevelt uses a psychological profile of the criminal to help identify a brutal killer before he strikes again.

The Man Who Was Thursday: a nightmare by G.K. Chesterton — published in 1908,“Thursday” is Lucian Gregory, an anarchistic poet in London

Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie- based on the Lindbergh kidnapping case

George & Rue by George Elliott Clarke – based on the 1949 murder of a taxi driver in New Brunswick, Canada, by Clarke's first cousins

Kings of the Earth by Jon Clinch - modeled after the three Ward brothers from upstate New York who work their farm and mind their own business, until one is suspected of fratricide.

Max Allan Collins's Nathan Heller series investigates famous cases:

True Detective - the fatal shooting of Chicago Mayor Anton Cermak, who was chatting with President Franklin D. Roosevelt at the time

Stolen Away – the Lindbergh baby kidnapping

Carnal Hours –Canadian millionaire Harry Oakes is murdered and his son-in-law is arrested

Blood and thunder - events leading to the assassination of Louisiana’s Huey Long

Damned in Paradise –Clarence Darrow’s 1931 defense of a group of men in Hawaii accused of killing a man thought to have been a rapist

Flying Blind - Amelia Earhart begins receiving threatening letters.

Majic Man - retiring Secretary of Defense, James Forrestal, thinks someone is out to get him

Angel in Black - the notorious Black Dahlia homicide where victim, Elizabeth Short, is a young woman whom Heller had known in Chicago

Chicago Confidential - In 1950, a congressional investigation into organized crime sparks an all-out mob war that claims the life of Heller’s partner

Zombie by Joyce Carol Oates - very loosely based on Jeffrey Dahmer and his predation.

Tokyo Year Zero by David Peace – based on a real-life serial-killer case in post-WWII Japan

Quiet Dellby Jayne Anne Phillips – based on the crimes of a real con man, a 1930’s Chicago woman journalist investigates the deaths of a woman and her three children.

Cottonwood by Scott Philips – set in a Kansas town that was home to the Bloody Benders with a plot that includes actual crimes and trials of the 1870s and 1880s

The Longings of Women by Marge Piercy – the story of Becky, one of the three main women in the book, parallels that of Pamela Smart, accused of conspiring to murder her husband in 1990

The Mystery of Marie Rogêtby Edgar Allan Poe – a short story known for being one of the first mysteries based on a real murder (of a New York cigar girl) and for using Holmes-like logic.

The Pieces from Berlin by Michael Pye - based on a real-life historical figure, a woman who made a fortune dealing in stolen art in wartime Berlin.

Possession by Ann Rule - a fictionalized account of the "Bagby Hot Springs" camper murders that happened a long time ago

Miss Lizzie by Walter Satterthwait – a young girl becomes friends with her elderly neighbor, Lizzie Borden, who was acquitted in the 1892 ax murders of her father and stepmother

A Twist at the End: a novel of O. Henry by Steven Saylor – crimes of the "The Servant Girl Annihilator" who roamed the streets of Austin, Texas a century ago impact a famous author

Tell Me Your Dreams by Sidney Sheldon - based on actual events, three beautiful young women become the prime suspects in a series of brutal killings

The Weight of Water by Anita Shreve - a photographer is to take photos of an island off the coast of New Hampshire, home to an immigrant family involved in an 1873 ax murder

Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey - Richard III and the princes in the Tower

The Franchise Affair by Josephine Tey - a 1940s take on the “kidnapping” of Elizabeth Canning in 1753

Two for Sorrow by Nicola Upson – based on the crimes of Amelia Sach and Annie Walters, who killed infants born of baby farming and were executed in London in 1903

The Benson Murder Case by S.S. van Dine - based on the murder of Joseph Elwell in 1920

Mafia Summer: the ballad of Sydney Butcher by E. Duke Vincent - based loosely on events from his own life in the summer of 1950 at the dawn of a new age of organized crime in the U.S.

Outside Valentine by Liza Ward - based on the murders committed by Charles Starkweather in Nebraska and Wyoming in the 1950s; Ward's grandparents were two of Starkweather's victims

Candle of the Wicked by Manly Wade Wellman - novelizes the events leading up to the discovery of the Bender killings.

The Garden 0f Martyrs by Michael C. White - based on actual events from 1806, traces the arrests and executions of two innocent Irish immigrants who are falsely accused of murder.

The Italian Boy by Sarah Wise —based on the story of three men arrested in London in 1831 for attempting to sell the suspiciously fresh cadaver of a teenage boy to a medical college

Dream of Ding Village by Lianke Yan – story of the impoverished village targeted by a blood-selling operation and the catastrophic outbreak of AIDS that decimated the community.

Georgine Olson, for FNSB Libraries

With much assistance from Fiction_L subscribers and the NoveList database

April 30, 2013

Dennis Lien notes on 5 November 2016 via email:

Belated addition:

I've been listening to the run of the old time radio show THE BLACKMUSEUM, where Orson Welles introduces narrations of British murdercases, most of them fairly famous. In looking at the Wikipedia entryfor the OTR show

I found that it has a list of the real cases which inspired the radioepisodes (which generally chnaged names of participants but keptfairly close to details of the crimes). Most of said cases citedthere have links to their own Wikipedia articles, and the individualones I looked at as of special interest to me in turn had listings ontheir own sites of fiction inspired by the murders. Somewhat to mysurprise there doesn't seem to be an "overarching" Wikipedia articlefor "fiction inspired by famous murder cases," but by looking these upindividually you should be able to retrieve a large number ofsuggestions -- at least for pre-1950 British cases. . .

5 comments:

Was The Man Who Was Thursday included by mistake for Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent, based on real events involving anarchists in London? Whatever else it is, The Man Who Was Thursday wasn't based om anything realistic. Conrad's Nostromo was also inspired by a real theft of silver and Under Western Eyes has characters based on real Russian anarchists. The connexions between The Great Gatsby and the Hall-Mills murder case are also remote. On the other hand, Meyer Wolfsheim in that book was directly based on Arnold Rothstein, the man who fixed the 1919 World Series.A Pin To See The Peepshow by F. Tennyson Jesse was also based on the Bywater-Thompson case.

One thing I wasn't aware of, was that this list was based on what's in the collection at the Fairbanks Public Library, which helps to explain some omissions...Georgine reports that she has ordered a copy of THE GIRL NEXT DOOR for the library, and added the Wilhelm to her list, and I'm passing along these comments to her.

Bill: Definitely! I imagine Meaker and "Anne Perry" never crossed paths too comfortably, if they ever have at all. I gather there was a specific case LOLITA was based on, as well.

Jerry: Shame on me for not immediately thinking of that one.

Anon: Had I allowed myself to think about it, the Chesterton was an odd choice. Conrad was certainly much more directly inspired by espionage at various levels.